http://dx.doi.org/10.18778/1505-9057.36.09 Tomasz Stępień*
“To Make the Enemy Immortal by the Sheer Play on
Words” – on Julian Tuwim’s Pamphlets
The quotation in the title comes from the poem On St. P. published in 1933 in “Wiadomości Literackie” (Literary News) (under the title On a certain stump) and later in Rhyme Fair (first edition 1934). Tuwim was, at that time, perhaps the most fa-mous and recognised poet in Poland, the author of six books of poems and two collec-tions of poems, a crucial contributor to the satiric pro-Sanation “Cyrulik Warszawski” (The Warsaw Barber) and a writer for the best cabarets in Warsaw. He presented his status as a literary star in an “auto-pamphlet” The poem with a silent ending. He wrote:
Not a sin, but vanity’s slime My well-being, people’s awe Mouth so full of shiny rhyme Agile wit and Warsaw
J. Tuwim, The poem with a silent ending1
This celebrity status, overwhelming for the poet’s ego (“Rescued by fear that’s in my chest, growing”), triggered a number of symptoms of ‘haterism’, as we would call it today.
Along with his rise in popularity, rose the number of his enemies and Tuwim responded to successive attacks with equal pungency:
And just think, that of all The glorious work
Of that gentleman – so from spittle Splutter, shouts, rubbish
* Prof. dr hab., e-mail: tomaszdear@gmail.com, Department of Communication Theory and Practice, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, The University of Bielsko Biala, 43-300 Biel-sko-Biala, 2 Willowa street.
1 In quotations I use the first edition of Dzieła by Julian Tuwim – J. Tuwim, Dzieła, vol. I: Wiersze, vol. 1–2, Warsaw 1955 and idem, Dzieła, vol. III: Jarmark rymów. Compilation by J. Stra-decki, Warsaw 1958.
Vomit, kicks and howling, Which he devoted half his life to, Of books and articles,
Of words, sentences and titles, Of reviews, mocking mentions, In short, of all that
Journalistic clutter
Will remain… just one poem, It’ll be his, not mine.
That very poem… Oh, the fierce revenge Inspired by the Jewish God!
With just one small limerick, To make the enemy immortal Through sheer play on words!…
J. Tuwim, O St. P.
Can the above poem be called a pamphlet? How will I define the word pam-phlet in the following article? Who was Tuwim’s enemy? Who/what was immor-talised/textualised by Tuwim as hostile?
According to the Dictionary of foreign words by M. Arct (fourteenth edition) printed in 1935, a pamphlet is ”a brochure, a flyer; usually the name pamphlet is used in reference to a prickly, insulting or slurry piece of text, a pasquil”. That rather narrow definition is matches three of Tuwim’s texts – the separately pub-lished Revolution in Germany, a flyer about Jan Kiepura and an illegal, separate publication of Poem in which the author politely but firmly implores…
The earlier and later dictionary and encyclopaedic definitions and the history of the term is presented by Henryk Markiewicz in a popular and fundamental study on the pamphlet. According to his final remarks a pamphlet is:
A piece attacking a specific person, community, institution or set of beliefs in a vola-tile way (while the artistic scale ranges from pathos to derision and vulgarity) or through argumentation using arbitrarily selected, exaggerated or made up informa-tion […] Thus understood, the pamphlet is not a literary genre, but a category of publicist and literary writing. It is realised in various genres (a publicist pamphlet in a dissertation, article, feuilleton, a literary pamphlet – in a satiric monologue, a com-edy, a novel, etc.) […] Apart from pure pamphlets there are also works which exhibit in their generic instrumentation some pamphlet characteristics (e.g. Wyspiański’s The Wedding) or fragments (The Warsaw Salon in part II of Dziady)2.
2 H. Markiewicz, Przekroje i zbliżenia dawne i nowe, PIW, Warsaw 1976, p. 96. It is also worth seeing the introduction Dorota Kozicka wrote to the selection of pamphlets: “Chamuły”, “Gnidy”,
The pasquill, according to Markiewicz, is a descriptive term (equivalent to pamphlet) in reference to old-Polish and Polish Enlightenment literature and, from XIX century, a value-laden one.
Let us go back to our poem now. Its “protagonist” is Stanisław Pieńkowski (1872–1942), one of the many adversaries of Tuwim in the interwar period. He was a literary and theatre critic, a publicist, a translator and a poet. In his youth he was involved in the independence and socialist movements, he was arrested and forced to leave the Russian Partition. He moved to Crakow and began his cooperation with “Życie”, where he published a dozen of his poems. He did publicist and liter-ary work, cooperated with magazines like “Głos”, “Ateneum”, “Książki”, “Kry-tyka”, and “Nasz kraj”. He dealt with literary critique, was interested in painting, architecture, and Hindu culture and philosophy (he translated Rigveda hymns). He also translated Paul Verlain’s Autumn Song, was one the first Polish translators of Nietzsche (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1901). During the First World War, he arrived in Kiev and worked with “Studio”, the local theatre of Stanisława Wysocka. After the war he came back to Warsaw in 1918, where, as a theatre critic, he published his reviews and articles in the National Democracy press (i.e. “Gazeta Poranna”, “Rzeczpospolita”, “Słowo Polskie”, “Myśl Narodowa”, “Gazeta Warszawska”). He was one of the leading publicists and literary critics of the national camp, in his aggressive attacks he virulently and brutally fought against any experiments in contemporary prose and poetry, most fervently attacking the Skamandrites. That “national-democratic” period in his life is punctuated by book publications: Dwa żywioły (Głos w sprawie żydowskiej) (1913) (Two elements (a say in the Jew-ish matter)), Maski życia (1925) (Masks of life), W ogniu walki. Szkice w sprawie żydowskiej (1929) (In the heat of battle. Sketches on the Jewish matter).
Stanisław Pieńkowski was an old adversary of Tuwim, the author of the Rhyme Fair “immortalised” him first in 1921 in the poem On a certain stump.
Let us recall that first pamhplet. Pieńkowski is called here, among other things:
Rabid in his stupid anger From a shoddy editorial office, Who in my Poetic Self Could see only a Jew; Pompous fool number one, Impertinent and impotent
Depending on his bile for lack of sperm Resting-in-peace, a quarter-talent God of gendarmes, priests and heirs
“Przemil czacze”. Antologia dwudziestowiecznego pamfletu polskiego, compilation and introduc-tion by D. Kozicka, Universitas, Cracow 2010, pp. 9–31.
A butting bull with a dulled horns Who impresses his aunt or his barber With the charm of his backlash. A sponger, lover of two Jewish girls A butt, criticaster, aestheteric
Who, before he scratches up a few words, Checks people’s pants and birth certificates
J. Tuwim:, Of a certain stump3
Similarly to the previous poem, we can see here enumeration, multiplica-tion of offensive terms describing the enemy, the equivoque technique. Tuwim wrote that pamphlet (anti-pamphlet, a reply to a pamphlet) in reaction to the ac-cusations and slander addressed to him and the whole group, which appeared in Pieńkowski’s texts. These, in turn, might have been caused by the attacks of cultural representatives of the ND camp in Picador, or earlier attacks in the works of Antoni Słonimski and Jan Lechoń found in the satiric brochures Królewsko--polski kabaret 1917–1918 (Kingdom of Poland cabaret 1917–1918) (in verse) and Facecje republikańskie 1918–1920 (Republican facetiae 1918–1920) (prose). Some of them were also presented in Picador. Lechoń, printing the texts in the volume Rzeczypospolita Babińska. Śpiewy historyczne (Babin Republic. Histori-cal songs) (1920), described them in the introduction as pamphlets. Tuwim at the same time presented on stage the programmatic Invective, which also bore the traits of a pamphlet:
In the face of tomorrow, the miserable and pompous fool, a parvenu, this hare out of a hemp patch, who has fattened up and is now kicking with a cocky hoof, must per-ish entirely. It was not for him that the heroic, bloody millions from all sides of the world fought! Like brittle glass under a steel hammer will this dull-headed bunch of enriched scoundrels, praisers of the golden cow and a fat calf, extortioners, penny-pinchers, spoiled nabobs who fattened up their pride – a voracious belly – on the harm of others:
[…] The future will hit you in the face with laughter and disdain, right in the sick weeds of the Great War, bourgeoisie suck-ups, blazed gentlefolk, idiotic gamblers, dandies, cheats, slippery born haggards, overdressed dummies of both sexes, lazy tools of fashion and luxury, faded and wan figures of the dandies of Europe past! You must flow off and die with this giant blood bath!!! The time of the workers has come. [15 X 1918]4.
3 J. Tuwim, Jarmark rymów, p. 80.
It can be clearly seen that the poetics of Tuwim’s pamphlets (hyperbolic enu-meration of offensive terms, puns) and their common recipients (capitalists, “the idler class” with its various embodiments) are shaped on the verge of Poland’s independence.
A passion for exposing, as one of the main characteristics of a pamphlet, was also a trait on the other side of the dispute. I will quote fragments from a text which, although it does not refer to Tuwim or other Skamander poets, seems to be a “matrix” which marks the polemic horizon and generates subsequent sequences of the main literary and political discourse during the interwar period:
It is not today that Piłsudski just started being a tool in the hands of international Jewry in its fight against the Polish Nation in order to not allow it to become independent. In 1905, when after the Japanese war the chains which bound Poland to Russia were be-ginning to rust and break, the internationals were already using Piłsudski in Poland, so that he may stir up a Russian revolt […]. The second time in 1914 […] the internationals used Piłsudski, this time no longer in the costume of a Russian revolutionist, but Bart the Winner […]. This part of the Jewish plan, aiming at a paralysis of the Nation during the great war and ripping away the fruit of the suffering of nameless victims, was filled by Piłsudski only half way, because the nationalist masses, the Nation’s good instincts, the Nation leaders’ reason and a will of steel with Dmowski coming first resisted […] effectively […]. And it was then that Piłsudski was sent to Poland for the third time, to poison her first years of independence and not allow an internal independence. […] For four years the Polish nation tried to overcome his last doing: Lviv, federalism, Vilnius, Kiev, Spa – these are the fields of massive political battles which Poland had to fight with the Jewish politics of the world, and everywhere the Nation had Piłsudski against it, and on the Jewish side as the most dangerous tool of the internationals5.
“The Nation prevailed” concludes fr. dr. Kazimierz Lutosławski at the end of his pamphlet (?), published in the 50th issue of “National Thought” in December
of 1922 as a comment to the news of Piłsudski’s withdrawal from the presidential race. A pamphlet parody of this vision of Poland’s history, and the history of the world prevalent in the entire interwar period, is the satire The anonymous power (1934), while a pamphlet commentary to this particular piece – and that which happened a bit later – may be seen in a fragment of Tuwim’s following poem:
On your chest a cross you bore, but a browning in your pocket. You formed an alliance with God, but made a pact with the murderer. […]
5 As cited in: Cz. Miłosz, Wyprawa w dwudziestolecie, Wydawnictwo Literackie, Cracow 1999, pp. 208–210.
Do not turn your eyes away! Stand still and look on, thugs! Yes! By the necks you should be held at this window! The funeral shot the Capital’s heart right through Like his chest was shot with bullets, now let her see Your faces, you criminals, and may you
Be greeted by a grieving street’s terrifying, silent scream J. Tuwim, The Funeral of President Narutowicz
Gabriel Narutowicz’s death changed Piłsudski, along with Tuwim and the other Skamandrites. They remained faithful allies of his until the late thirties, the enemies of his enemies, especially those who had anything to do with National Democracy. In the collection Blooded words, the poem quoted above is super-seded by a poetic portrait of one of the addressees of The Funeral…:
Now he is set. He wears his festive clothes: Yellow shoes, a tailcoat scented with naphthalene A lilac tie, his “half-shirt” wrinkled,
And a shiny rubber collar.
In a foggy mirror, with a golden frame He sees a fattened face, a greasy neck “Poland”, he whispers, “my beloved land!
And you, France – here I am – long may you live!” […]
It is he – the guild butcher –
Who celebrates rebellion and wipes a tear, He – an ally of July’s revolt,
Korfanty, all the saints and Haller! J. Tuwim, Julliet’s Quatorze
This image of a politically defined petite bourgeoisie (or rather a female petite bourgeoisie) will appear again in the thirties within a series of “epistolographic” satirical works of prose (How I suffer, my dear lady, Found letter I–II, ). National Democrat petite bourgeoisie, and their political and journalistic representatives are the addressees of Tuwim’s more or less pamphlet-like satire, as well at the sat-ire of the “Warsaw Barber” after the May Coup, while Piłsudski and his literary allies are the main object of attacks from the nationalist camp.
In 1933, neither the area of conflict, nor the argumentation changes, and Stanisław Pieńskowski has a firm opinion of Tuwim:
He writes that I’m a butcher, A shaggy Jew and a Bolshevik,
A “Judococcus”, a germ, A baboon, a skamandrile; That I sell my homeland out, That I distort the Polish tongue, That I profane and desecrate And devil knows what else.
J. Tuwim, O St. P.
Other genuine insults can be added on top of those mentioned above: Jew-ish pornographer”, and “hyena”. The poet’s image as seen through the eyes of National Democrat journalists and critics appears earlier on in an “autopamphlet” My little day (1926).
In the thirties, a magazine called “Bluntly” (“Prosto z Mostu”) began to ap-pear in shops next to “Nationalist View”, and “Warsaw Gazette”, and (besides the “old” enemies: Stanisław Pieńkowski, Władysław Rabski) new counter-argu-ers appeared such as Stanisław Piasecki, Jerzy Pietrkieiwsz, Wojciech Kawecki and other younger journalists of the nationalist camp. Also… Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński. I’ve written more extensively about the pamphlet in Skumbrie w To-macie contained in Tuwim’s Ozór na Szaro elsewhere, along with the pamphlet-retort to the Letter to friends from “Bluntly” titled Smorgoński Savonorala6. Here
I will recall one more work dedicated to the editor of a weekly magazine which competed with the Skamandritic “Literary News” – The poet envies a certain writ-er named Staś, because he is a nobleman, while he, the miswrit-erable poet, is a mangy Jew, so here we have the story of both sides. This baroque title points to irony as the main element of the pamphlet quality in this poem. Its quality is defined by taking the stereotypes of the Jew-Communist and the Pole-Catholic to the absurd.
In Staś’s dayroom, a small knight and serf stand And Kostia Gałczyński wears a gorget,
While in my synagogue a Bolshevik, a herring And Ajzyk Słonimsker hide behind a cabinet
J. Tuwim, The poet envies a certain writer named Staś…
And unveiling the genealogy of the editor of “Prosto z Mostu” – with a scheme of “I’m a Jew, and who are you – also a Jew” (the archetype for this pamphlet strategy of unveiling is an earlier poem of Tuwim’s where he meticu-lously reconstructs the poem Lineage by a National Democrat affiliated critic named Władysław Rabski):
6 See T. Stępień, Gałczyński i Tuwim, in: Julian Tuwim. Biografia. Twórczość. Recepcja, K. Ratajska, T. Cieślak (eds.), Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, Lodz 2007, pp. 133–152.
Staś’s granny has a noble coat of arms And mine – from the shaggiest of Jews Majufestanz? Goldefeld? Or Silberberg? I myself don’t know, but something of the sort.
J. Tuwim, The poet envies a certain writer named Staś…
A particular variety of Tuwim’s personal satire is the obscene “pamphlet-epigram”, in which a minimum of words brings a maximum of satirical negation. Exemplification is delivered through the use of names in the title (O Januszu Kaweckim), as well as by calling out the name of the group (At the National Dem-ocrat – janitor, To the old and the new from the Camp of Great Poland). As an example, let us quote one of the epigrams titled To one National Democrat who barks at me:
You waited in vain for me to write you back, I won’t flick your nose nor will you get a smack. I won’t even say that a dog fucked your arse7
For to the dog it would be a mésalliance. J. Tuwim, To one ND who barked at me
In these personal pamphlets, Tuwim tends to defend himself rather than at-tack others. In the satire and anti-N.D. (National Democrat) personal pamphlets we have a reaction to previous attacks by journalists from both the older and younger nationalist circles. Next to Pieńkowski, Rabski and Gałczyński, we also find Adolf Nowaczyński who was treated more gently. In the poem I will take my robe, the satirical first person embodies the role of a Polish ally of international fascism, and Marian Dąbrowski – the editor of the “Illustrated Daily Courier” – is called out by name (earlier, Tuwim uncovered Jewish advertising in the “Warsaw Gazette”). Are representatives of other ideological/political opinions present in Tuwim’s satirical poems? Jan Nothingcanhelphim Miller (Jan Nepomucen Miller…), a writer for “The Worker”, shows up, but this is more likely due to a negative review of The Gypsy Bible8. But whom/what does Tuwim attack of his own accord?
The amount and importance of the objects of satirical critique is quite broad and extensive. Nearing Poland’s independence, these objects were mostly the German army and it’s “ordnung” (Before Paris, Revolution in Germany), the Tsar’s and Bolsheviks’ autocracy, and the “Russian soul” (Death Rhapsody for
7 In that verse Tuwim refers to an unmentionable phrase used in one of the version of the song Pierwsza Brygada, which was recently brought up by an MP from the Law and Justice party, Joachim Brudziński – see np. http://natemat.pl/83619, j-l-was-pies-joachim-brudzinski-oburzony-usunieciem-imienia-lechakaczynskiego- z-nazwy-mostu [accessed on: 29.11.2013].
Colonel Romanov, The Great Teodora). Somewhat later, the pacifistic Caira ap-peared (1922): pacifism is a constant theme in all of Tuwim’s work. However, The Decade is a pamphlet aimed at young Poland’s “fools in capes”, written from the position of a poetic group which had won over the literary market; While in small political plays and the poems in Rhyme Market we will also find ridicule of the fu-turists and the avant-garde. The writer turns his satirical and humorous attention to (ethnically various) women who expose their sexuality excessively (Semi-Eros, a Letter to a Woman) and their writer worshippers (On incontinent slut-praising), playwrights, punsters, friends, visitors, waiters… Then there is the entire area of personal and institutional “courtly satire” dedicated to befriended soldiers be-longing to Piłsudski’s army and members of the Sanation movement. Of course I do not view all of these poems as pamphlets – they are often gentle moral satire, or simple humoresques. Some of them, however, can be seen as quasi-pamphlets, pieces which are a parody of the pamphlet discourse between political opponents (like the poem Demon dedicated to Szymon Askenazy).
The Tuwim who is present in his writing considers his main enemies to be generals and businesspeople who are their source of power. An aversion to the former makes Tuwim not only an opponent of National Democracy, but also “an enemy of the state’s defence”, who is threatened with the guillotine by national-ists, and for whom government bodies ready a place in Bereza Kartuska prison. On the other hand, the poems dedicated to the representatives of financial markets (such as Stockjobbers or Bank) provoke accusations of anti-Semitism. Bureau-cracy is also an enemy of Tuwim’s – both on a department level, and at the level of the main government administrative organs – as well as state and state-creating ideology which had a more or less totalitarian feel in the thirties. When compar-ing other elements of poetic/literary/journalistic negation which are present in all of Tuwim’s work, one can conclude that they create the big picture of the “twilight of the West”.
Towards the end, I would like to note various areas of the functioning of a modern state and society which are mentioned in Tuwim’s “pamphlet” works. The following things meet with Tuwim’s absolute disapproval:
First: the ruling establishment (the military, big capital) and the social
elite associated with it, so all those who are responsible for wars, and the destitution of simple people (To the generals, Bang-bang, Mercy, Stockjobbers,
Bank, To the simple man, Couplet’s flop);
Second: The state, its institutions and legitimizations (ideology, religion): Assyria, The reporter, The Protest, The provincial poster, Hagiography, Support LOPP, From poems about the state, The golden Polish autumn;
Third: pop culture/media – kitschy and dazzling with sex and violence, brutalizing and manipulative towards the receiver (On the incontinent slut-prais-ing of our age, A few words about operettas, To playwrights, The director, John
Łoboda’s career, Hilary Pęcikowski’s crime in the light of five Warsaw maga-zines, Stop!);
Fourth: “Simple people”, “the lonely crowd”, mass society. In Tuwim’s po-ems, snapshots of the country and the city, pamphletesque images of a “gendar-merie corporal” and an “excitable arch-beast, a frightening virgin (Fun), a “count” from the toilet (Luxury), a snobby fool from a cafe (The Martyr), fans of cinema (Cinebrutes, A Page from the History of Mankind) – all of them combine to form the image of Residents that you can meet at The Rally. The crowd which was “in the right” in Spring, is no longer necessarily worth much in The Spring of Brutes, and towards the end of the thirties, the multiplied simple man raises hatred lined with fear.
Here comes the scraping, the choir of mumbling To the streets from their holes they have come Two hundred thousand, three hundred thousand Dressed up holiday nightmares
[…]
It is them – the makers of bellied hags
The makers of schnitzel, newspapers, triumphs and flops abbreviations, passports, money and sports,
Of the word “tasteful” and the word “pork loin”. It is them – the nation, society, the century, The style and epoch, and the course of history, The same eternal dangerous enemy,
The common wiretap, a spy of mass proportions
J. Tuwim, *** [Here comes the scraping, the choir of mumbling]
Two poems – which, accordingly with the tradition of a pamphlet, circled be-yond censorship – can be considered points of destination: Ball at the Opera read through copies, and the illegally published Poem in which the author politely, but firmly asks multitudes of his fellow men to kiss his ass. The latter is a collective pamphlet of Tuwim’s enemies, specific (although not always recognisable) people and their types, representatives of various institutions, as well as political and social phenomena. For, who is not present here! Capitalists and nationalists (Pol-ish and pan-Slavic ones, German, Jew(Pol-ish), fascists and socialists, “distingu(Pol-ished cunts”, “gigolos”, and also “head cutters and ruffians”, “Isreali doctors”, “learned monkeys”, “science brains”, nouveau riche, professors, “record breakers and sportsmen”, “ghost catchers from Jasna Góra”. We have “farts of the Germanic spirit”, “orthodox Jewish cretin tears”, “cultured *****”, “London’s splendour and spleen on a repellent face”. All of this within a specific modal frame.
Tuwim’s poem has a rich subject literature9 – here I will only note that it used
to be treated as a pamphlet aimed at Poland during Sanation, while it might as well be treated as a pamphlet aimed at the civilization and culture of developed capitalism which was very current for the poet at the time. Elements of a critical way of settling scores with the interwar period also show up in Polish Flowers, however in that poem a nostalgia towards the lost world of youth and adulthood dominates.
Ball at the Opera, on the other hand, a culmination and a synthesis of Tu-wim’s creative work of the interwar period, is also a summary of a world fated for damnation… The apocalypse, however, although we do not always remember this, is not only a manifestation of doom. St. John’s apocalypse foretells the doom of Babylon, and the coming of a new Jerusalem, in which the honest, who will be saved, will praise the Lord. The post-war variant of the poem (with an apocalyptic aspect) seems to announce the coming of a new reality, a great new world (I have suggested this in a separate article10). In defence of this “new Jerusalem”, Tuwim
will write more (although not many) pamphlets and auto-pamphlets:
An “agent”? But of course! An agent, dear libeller! An agent – an unpaid one, and for a noble cause, And you – you are kept by banker wildlings From a cash box that arms your mother’s killers J. Tuwim, Reply
But that is a completely different story.
Bibliography
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9 See, among others, M. Głowiński, Wstęp, in: J. Tuwim, Wiersze wybrane, Ossolineum, Wro-claw 1964; J. Sawicka, “Apokalipsa” Juliana Tuwima (“Bal w Operze”), in: “Filozofia słowa” Juliana Tuwima, Ossolineum, Wroclaw 1975; L. Neuger, Juliana Tuwima “De Revolutionibus” (propozycje interpretacyjne “Balu w Operze”), in: Pomysły do interpretacji. Studia i szkice o literaturze polskiej, Oficyna Literacka, Cracow 1997, pp. 37–56; S. Barańczak, Zemsta na słowie. Julian Tuwim: “Bal w operze”, in: Tablica z Macondo, Aneks, London 1990; A. Węgrzyniakowa, Dialektyka językowej or-ganizacji tekstu w poezji Tuwima, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, Katowice 1987, pp. 175–181; T. Stępień, Kabaret Juliana Tuwima, Wydawnictwo, “Śląsk”, Katowice 1989, pp. 158–230.
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Tomasz Stępień
“To Make the Enemy Immortal by the Sheer Play on Words” – on Julian Tuwim’s Pamphlets
(Summary)
The article presents both the formal aspects of the poetics of Tuwim’s pamphlets (enumera-tion, hyperbole, grotesque, irony) and the figures of those who are the targets of his satirical ad-dresses. Tuwim used verse satires to create polemical and ironic portraits of individual people (the main figure being a nationalist journalist and literary critic Stanisław Pieńkowski) as well as to ridicule state institutions, ideologies and political parties. The author also analyses pamphlet-like lyrical poems, columns and literary criticism by Julian Tuwim. In conclusion the author describes some elements of the cultural milieu which the poet refers to in his satirical writing (popular cul-ture and the media, totalitarian ideologies, mass-society).
